Roll over, Beethoven

Computer will finish 10th symphony

In the most ambitious project of its type ever attempted, a computer has been set to work to complete Beethoven’s unfinished 10th symphony.

Artificial intelligence has long been able to compete with the human mind at games such as chess and complex maths problems. But musicologists and computer programmers in Germany are attempting to prove it can replicate creative genius.

They plan to put the results to the test in a public performance by a symphony orchestra in Bonn, Beethoven’s birthplace, next year. The project is part of celebrations to mark the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth.

It is known that Beethoven was working on a 10th symphony in his final years from his letters and the accounts of his contemporaries.

Gerhard von Breuning, a friend of the composer, wrote about Beethoven telling his father how the work would have a “new gravitational force” that would go beyond even his celebrated ninth symphony, one of the most revolutionary works of its time.

But Beethoven left behind only a few fragmentary musical sketches of what he planned. The new project aims to use a computer to create the full work he might have composed.

“The quality of genius cannot be fully replicated, still less if you’re dealing with Beethoven’s late period,” Christine Siegert, head of the Beethoven Archive in Bonn and one of those involved in the project, told the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

“The project’s goal should be to integrate Beethoven’s existing musical fragments into a coherent musical flow. That’s difficult enough, and if this project can manage that, it will be an incredible accomplishment.”

Machine learning software is fed the musical sketches Beethoven left behind for the symphony. It is also fed other examples of his work and of the composers who influenced him.

“Take a particular Beethoven work, one for which extensive drafts still exist, like the Eroica symphony. If you feed the computer both the sketches and the final product, it can figure out how Beethoven works with sketches and where he goes from there,” Siegert said.

The project is being funded by Deutsche Telekom and is headed by Matthias Roder, director of the Karajan Institute in Salzburg.

“No machine has been able to do this for so long,” Roder told Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. “This is unique.”

There will be some human input. While the computer will write the music, a composer will orchestrate it.